In London

My younger brother was in London when the Martians
fell at Woking. He was a medical student working for an
imminent examination, and he heard nothing of the arrival
until Saturday morning. The morning papers on Saturday
contained, in addition to lengthy special articles on the planet
Mars, on life in the planets, and so forth, a brief and vaguely
worded telegram, all the more striking for its brevity.

The Martians, alarmed by the approach of a crowd, had
killed a number of people with a quick-firing gun, so the
story ran. The telegram concluded with the words: "Formidable
as they seem to be, the Martians have not moved from
the pit into which they have fallen, and, indeed, seem incapable
of doing so. Probably this is due to the relative strength
of the earth's gravitational energy." On that last text their
leader-writer expanded very comfortingly.

Of course all the students in the crammer's biology class,
to which my brother went that day, were intensely interested,
but there were no signs of any unusual excitement in the
streets. The afternoon papers puffed scraps of news under big
headlines. They had nothing to tell beyond the movements
of troops about the common, and the burning of the pine
woods between Woking and Weybridge, until eight. Then
the ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE, in an extra-special edition, announced
the bare fact of the interruption of telegraphic communication.
This was thought to be due to the falling of burning pine
trees across the line. Nothing more of the fighting was known
that night, the night of my drive to Leatherhead and
back.

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My brother felt no anxiety about us, as he knew from the
description in the papers that the cylinder was a good two
miles from my house. He made up his mind to run down that
night to me, in order, as he says, to see the Things before
they were killed. He despatched a telegram, which never
reached me, about four o'clock, and spent the evening at a
music hall.

In London, also, on Saturday night there was a thunderstorm,
and my brother reached Waterloo in a cab. On the
platform from which the midnight train usually starts he
learned, after some waiting, that an accident prevented trains
from reaching Woking that night. The nature of the accident
he could not ascertain; indeed, the railway authorities did not
clearly know at that time. There was very little excitement
in the station, as the officials, failing to realise that
anything further than a breakdown between Byfleet and Woking
junction had occurred, were running the theatre trains which
usually passed through Woking round by Virginia Water or
Guildford. They were busy making the necessary arrangements
to alter the route of the Southampton and Portsmouth
Sunday League excursions. A nocturnal newspaper reporter,
mistaking my brother for the traffic manager, to whom he
bears a slight resemblance, waylaid and tried to interview
him. Few people, excepting the railway officials, connected
the breakdown with the Martians.

I have read, in another account of these events, that on
Sunday morning "all London was electrified by the news
from Woking." As a matter of fact, there was nothing to
justify that very extravagant phrase. Plenty of Londoners
did not hear of the Martians until the panic of Monday morning.
Those who did took some time to realise all that the
hastily worded telegrams in the Sunday papers conveyed.
The majority of people in London do not read Sunday
papers.